The library's citation reads in part: "This is a sophisticated and elegantly written study that takes a fresh approach to the role of Catholicism among the Central Powers during the First World War… Using a wealth of wide-ranging sources, Houlihan challenges the narratives that have stressed secularisation and emphasises the extent to which Catholic belief helped Germans and Austrians—women as well as men—to endure the hardships and sacrifices of war."

The Friends of the German Historical Institute have awarded the 2015 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize to Sarah Panzer, PhD'15, for "The Prussians of the East: Samurai, Bushido, and Japanese Honor in the German Imagination, 1905–1945," which examines the ways in which Japanese martial culture was understood, recontextualized, and appropriated by German civil society during the first half of the twentieth century. She published a portion of her research in Beyond Alterity: German Enounters with Modern East Asia (Berghahn Books, 2014), which was edited by Qinna Shen and Martin Rosenstock. Michael Geyer chaired Sarah's dissertation committee; Susan Burns and Leora Auslander were readers.

Since 1997 the friends have awarded this prestigious prize for the one or two best doctoral dissertations on German history written at North American universities the previous year. The GHI will present Sarah with the award on November 14 at the 24th Annual Symposium of the Friends.